Folk’s fight for the Democratic nomination tore the state wide open, but Steffens’s articles had built the district attorney into such a heroic figure that the party did not dare reject him. “Your last article was magnificent and came in just in time to be of tremendous service,” a grateful Folk told Steffens. “You ought to be here and see how the people can run things when they take a mind to,” he observed, having witnessed the effect of the article on the public; “my faith in the plain people has not been misplaced.” They had achieved a stunning victory, Folk happily noted, “when one thinks of the mighty power arrayed on the other side, the great corporations, the boodlers, the gamblers, a gigantic political machine, every professional politician in the State.” This “bloodless political revolution,” he continued, could never have been accomplished without the indefatigable work of Steffens and the support of McClure.
After Missouri, Steffens pursued investigations in five other states. In Wisconsin, he told the story of “Fighting Bob” La Follette. Soon after La Follette’s election as governor, it became clear that his real adversaries were the corrupt leaders in his own Republican Party, who had “fixed” the legislature to kill his reform measures and “discredit him with defeat.” The failed legislative session taught La Follette that he had to outmaneuver the bosses, creating an organization of his own to beat the system and install trustworthy men in the legislature. This conflict was still raging when Steffens arrived in Wisconsin. “To have you turn your searchlight on Wisconsin politics is better than anything our guardian angel could do for us—on earth at least,” La Follette’s wife, Belle, confided to the reporter.
Appearing a month before the election, Steffens’s article applauded the young reformer’s struggle against an entrenched system, asserting that his “long, hard fight” offered the people of Wisconsin a chance to make their government work for the common good rather than private interests. “La Follette’s people think it has turned the scale in his favor,” Steffens informed his father, “but the other side is howling at it and at me. It has sold out the magazine already.” Governor La Follette not only won reelection but finally “met a friendly legislature,” comprised of men who had “gone through the fire” with him and would readily enact his reform measures to regulate the railroads, institute the direct primary, address workmen’s compensation, and establish tax reform. “No one will ever measure up the full value of your share in this immediate result,” an exultant La Follette wrote Steffens. During reelection campaigning, La Follette witnessed the impact of Steffens’s article “everywhere,” even “out on the farms, away back among the bluffs and coulees of the Mississippi,” noting a distinct “difference” in his reception before and after its publication. “The article settled things,” he said. “It was like the decision of a court of last resort.”
“THE PRESIDENT HAS BEEN VERY interested in your articles,” Roosevelt’s secretary informed Steffens on August 24, 1903. “He wishes to inquire if you cannot come down here some time to see him.” A week later, Steffens joined Roosevelt for lunch at Oyster Bay, renewing a friendship somewhat chilled by Steffens’s frequent carping that the president compromised too readily with conservatives in his efforts to move legislation forward. Throughout his complicated relationship with Roosevelt, Steffens worked to maintain his distance “as a political critic,” keeping personal affection separate from professional judgment. For his part, Roosevelt managed to overcome his occasional irritation with Steffens in order to maintain a mutually advantageous alliance.
During lunch, the two men spoke of Joseph Folk and his great fight against the Missouri bosses. Shortly thereafter, Steffens followed up with a letter urging the president to meet with the young reformer. “He is a Democrat, but only as you are a Republican, and in motives and purposes you and he would be in perfect accord,” the journalist reassured him, adding, “you can get from him a great deal of information about essential facts, and all honestly given. Mr. Folk has gotten no little of his inspiration from you.” Roosevelt readily agreed to send a letter of invitation to the young district attorney through Steffens. “I wonder if you realize what a fundamental gratification such a letter will be to this man who has gone a long while along a lonely road with all big men against him,” Steffens appreciatively replied to the president.
When Folk appeared at the White House, Steffens related to his father, “he and the President, Democrat and Republican, became confidential at sight, and the President thanked me for bringing Folk to his notice.” Writing to a Missouri Republican, Roosevelt later proclaimed that though Folk headed the Democratic ticket, his nomination represented “a complete destroying of the old corrupt machine, and the success of the movement for honesty and decency.” He assured the politician that “it would be better for the republicans to endorse his nomination instead of making any nomination against him.” Such a step would not only demonstrate “a spirit of true citizenship,” the president continued, but would “be wise policy on our part.”
The Missouri Republicans ignored Roosevelt’s advice, choosing to nominate Cyrus P. Walbridge, a conservative businessman who had been mayor of St. Louis. Although concern for the general Republican ticket in Missouri kept Roosevelt from publicly supporting Folk, he refused to endorse Walbridge and was delighted when William Allen White penned a ringing editorial endorsement of Folk in the Emporia Gazette. In plain language, White charged that those who voted against the honest Democrat Folk would be voting “with the boodlers, and their victory, whether it is republican or what not, will be in reality a victory for boodle.” He reminded Missouri’s citizenry that “parties are means for good government and not its ends,” insisting that “it is better to be a bolter to a party than a traitor to a state.” White’s editorial made headlines across the nation and threw Missouri Republicans into what The Washington Post described as “a state of violent excitement, to use a mild phrase.”
Folk ran a superb campaign, gaining enough votes from independents and reform-minded Republicans to override the corrupt Democratic machine and win the election by over 30,000 votes. “It must make you feel good,” Folk later wrote Steffens, “to know the important part you had in bringing about these results.” He reiterated the profound obligation he felt toward the reporter and his magazine for their role in the upset victory.
Folk was not alone in recognizing the publication’s growing influence. McClure’s, the monthly periodical Arena proclaimed, was “one of the greatest moral factors in America.” Having “discovered that the first step toward curing an evil is to make it known,” the magazine had become “a powerful exponent of the national revolt against corrupt and oppressive methods in business, in finance and in government.” Month after month, its pages contained “must-read” pieces, spurring a national conversation on contemporary issues.
Just a few years earlier, one critic observed, McClure’s was “distinctly literary in its character, and its content was given over exclusively to reviews, essays, stories and poems.” Both format and function had since undergone a dramatic and influential metamorphosis: “The daily newspaper gives the facts as they occur from day to day, with editorial comment thereon, but it is left for the magazine to come along afterwards with a summary of these facts and their relation to one another.” When vital issues were treated with depth and insight, people began “thinking for themselves, and a thinking people, if honest, will seldom go wrong in the end.”
AWARE OF MCCLURE’S BURGEONING POLITICAL clout, Roosevelt invited Sam McClure himself to lunch at the White House on October 9. Steffens joined them for dinner, and the three men talked until midnight. Roosevelt offered to furnish the sources and documents for a potential series of articles outlining his struggles with the trusts and the unions. In the end, however, McClure preferred to continue with Steffens’s series on corruption, focusing on a pitched battle being fought in Ohio between a group of young reformers and the Old Guard, led by Mark Hanna. Steffens was energized by the prospect, recognizing that Hanna re
mained the sole person who could snatch the nomination from Roosevelt—and that if he succeeded, the Republican Party would turn its back on reform.
A preliminary skirmish against Hanna earlier that spring had turned to Roosevelt’s advantage. Stirring up trouble, Ohio’s senior senator Joseph Foraker had introduced a resolution endorsing Roosevelt’s 1904 candidacy at a state convention assembled to nominate candidates for state office in 1903. The development placed Hanna in a bind. As Republican National Convention chairman, he did not want to preclude all other candidacies—including his own—at such an early date, yet he would need administration support to promote his bid for a second Senate term in the fall. In light of his position, Hanna told Roosevelt he felt obliged to oppose the premature endorsement. He did not think it proper for a state convention to “assume the responsibilities” of the following year’s national convention. “When you know all the facts,” he concluded, “I am sure that you will approve my course.” Roosevelt delayed his reply for twenty-four hours. Seeking advice from friends, he ultimately decided that “the time had come to stop shilly-shallying” and inform Hanna that he “did not intend to assume the position, at least passively, of a suppliant to whom he might give the nomination as a boon.”
“Your telegram received,” Roosevelt finally responded. “I have not asked any man for his support. I have had nothing whatever to do with raising this issue. Inasmuch as it has been raised of course those who favor my administration and my nomination will favor endorsing both and those who do not will oppose.” Roosevelt’s curt message left Hanna little choice. “In view of the sentiment expressed,” Hanna telegraphed back, “I shall not oppose the endorsement of your administration and candidacy by our State Convention.”
The publicized exchange of telegrams humiliated Hanna. “It was surrender, unequivocal and certain,” declared a California paper. Headlines across the country proclaimed the older man’s loss of power: “Hanna Backs Down to Roosevelt and Takes Water Like a Swan”; “Hanna Obeys the President’s Wishes.” Roosevelt tried to mitigate the sting with a personal letter. “I hated to do it because you have shown such broad generosity and straightforwardness in all your dealing with me,” he told the senator, proceeding to offer justifications for his actions. “I do not think you appreciated the exact effect that your interview and announced position had in the country at large. It was everywhere accepted as the first open attack on me.” Before closing, he confirmed his intention to attend the wedding of Hanna’s daughter in Cleveland a few weeks later and expressed hope that the two of them could have “a real talk—not just a half hours chat” while he was there.
But the damage was already done. The tense interchange had intensified Hanna’s reluctance to publicly endorse Roosevelt’s candidacy, fueling supporters’ confidence that Hanna would eventually announce his own candidacy. That fall, Hanna launched “the most arduous and exciting stumping tour of his career,” rallying the conservative Ohio base behind his chosen slate of candidates for the state legislature. The results were “an overwhelming personal victory” for Hanna, assuring his own reelection to the Senate. The landslide victory, “almost unique in American politics,” constituted proof that Hanna was once more “Boss of the Republican party” and Roosevelt “a discredited leader.”
“There is alarm in the Roosevelt camp,” a Canton, Ohio, newspaper reported. The spectacular showing by Hanna’s conservative wing of the party in the Ohio elections, coupled with the defeat of Roosevelt’s reform ticket in New York, appeared to signal “the turning point” in the president’s career: “Unless Mr. Roosevelt can retrieve his fortunes in a Napoleonic manner,” the Omaha Evening World-Herald predicted, “the dual elections in Ohio and New York will mark the time that saw the tide begin to ebb from Theodore Roosevelt.” The president himself was particularly disturbed by reform mayor Seth Low’s defeat in New York. “The wealthy capitalists who practice graft and who believe in graft alike in public and in private life, gave Tammany unlimited money just as they will give my opponent,” he grimly told a friend.
Reports multiplied of telegrams and letters of support arriving “by the bushel” in Hanna’s office, beseeching him to rally Republican opposition to Roosevelt and build a steady, conservative platform that would foster prosperity and cultivate the pro-business policies begun under McKinley. “It is agreed by leaders of the party that the distinguished gentleman may now have the nomination for the asking,” one editorial stated flatly, further suggesting that “Roosevelt may well be apprehensive. The vast following of McKinley will be found back of the Ohio Senator and this together with his own strength will certainly be potent enough to overcome any opposition at the national convention of his party in 1904.”
Compounding these difficulties, a campaign financed by the corporations to discredit the president began to gain traction. The Union Pacific’s E. H. Harriman dispatched hundreds of letters claiming that Roosevelt had “lost his popularity in the far west” and suggesting that without that region’s support, he would be a weak candidate. Criticism of Roosevelt converged on “the general idea that he [was] impulsive, erratic and not to be counted on.” Stories were circulated to emphasize his dangerously irresponsible, capricious nature. One disgruntled southerner, still aghast at Roosevelt’s dinner invitation to Booker T. Washington, relayed an anecdote of particularly maniacal behavior. “We have a wild boy in the White House,” he dismissively observed, painting the president as incompetent and immature: “The other day Roosevelt set out in his yacht from Oyster Bay in the teeth of a hurricane and against warning and advice, and nearly wrecked the vessel before he got to safety; and as he paced up and down the plunging deck and the wild winds blew his coat-tails over his head, there in his pocket was a six-shooter, just as if he were still a boy playing a game out on the plains!”
Rumormongers speculated that Senator Lodge was now “worried lest Hanna should come out at the eleventh hour as a candidate, and wrest the nomination.” Roosevelt himself was said to fear that there was “a plot brewing” designed to “rob him of the prize at the last moment.” White House lunch guests were reportedly queried about whether there was “any prospect of Hanna getting the delegates” in their respective states, a line of questioning that indicated genuine apprehension on Roosevelt’s part.
AMID THIS DISCORD, LINCOLN STEFFENS’S foray into Ohio politics could not have been more fortuitous for Roosevelt. The reporter explained to his father that he was “hoping to get Hanna,” and that by unmasking the powerful Ohio boss, he might affect the presidential election just as he had transformed the prospects of Joseph Folk. “If I am to have so much influence,” he wrote, “I want to make it a power for the possible and worth while.” Before embarking on this project, he would return to the capital “for a short confab with the President.” To be sure, “Roosevelt may be beaten,” Steffens warranted, “but he will not be beaten without some pretty stiff fighting,” and in that battle for reform, he added, with both accuracy and characteristic grandiosity, “we expect to deal some of the heaviest blows.”
Steffens spent five weeks in Ohio talking with newspaper editors, politicians, bosses, and citizen groups in Cleveland, Toledo, Columbus, and Cincinnati. “Hanna is my villain this time,” he informed his father in late January 1904. Acknowledging that the piece was “pretty rough” on the senator, he nevertheless maintained that “it’s true and may do good.” Hanna might have considered himself “above the danger mark,” added Steffens, but a close examination of his career revealed many troubling, even criminal aspects.
The piece depicted Hanna as a businessman who had entered politics for the sole purpose of gaining special privileges for his street railway system. To secure advantages, Steffens explained, Hanna systematically “degraded the municipal legislature” through campaign contributions and outright bribery. Success only inflamed his ambitions. “He wanted to have a President,” Steffens wrote, so he engineered the “spontaneous demand” for William McKinley and backed him with th
e largest campaign fund ever raised. Then Hanna resolved to become a U.S. senator. Since the votes were cast by the state legislature in 1898, Steffens reported, “legislators were kidnapped, made drunk and held prisoners,” bribed and threatened with revolvers; in the end, unsurprisingly, Hanna emerged victorious. Steffens concluded that the system Hanna established in Ohio was “government of the people by politicians hired to represent the privileged class . . . the most dangerous form of our corruption.” And this malignant operator “was the choice of big business and bad machine politics for President of the United States.”
Steffens had nearly completed the first draft of his exposé when Hanna was stricken with typhoid fever. While his doctors hoped for a full recovery, they admitted that “the senator’s advanced age and rheumatic conditions [made] the case a more serious one than in a younger man.” When Roosevelt was informed of Hanna’s illness, he walked over to the Arlington Hotel, where the senator and his wife occupied a large suite. “For some inexplicable reason, this affected him very much,” Roosevelt told Elihu Root. After the president left, Hanna asked for paper and pen. “My Dear Mr. President,” he wrote. “You touched a tender spot, old man, when you called personally to inquire after me this a.m. I may be worse before I can be better, but all the same, such ‘drops’ of kindness are good for a fellow.” Always gracious at such times, Roosevelt quickly responded: “Indeed, it is your letter from your sick bed which is touching—not my visit. May you very soon be with us again, old fellow, as strong in body and as vigorous in your leadership and your friendship as ever.”
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 55
